"If you lose your key to your house then you are stuck. If you lose your key (an AUTHORIZED DVD player) then you are going to have to purchase another one. There is no need for DeCSS."
What I find particularly amusing about this is that we are allowed to make copies of our keys to get into our houses, in case our originals get damaged, lost, etc. But we are not allowed to make copies of our "keys" to view DVDs? Why not? Those "keys" aren't patented or copyrighted, to my knowledge.
...that the RIAA was only going after SERVICE providers that helped people trade mp3s. AIMster, to my knowledge, is only software that doesn't rely upon a central server (being based on gnutella and all). So how exactly are they going to get an injunction? The whole point with Napster was that Napster provided a SERVICE, NOT software, to help people trade mp3s. Therefore, it wasn't quite like suing someone for using FAT32 for piracy. I think the approprate analogy would be free disk-space type providers that used FAT32 to allow people to store and distribute mp3s =).
Microsoft is also making it so that earlier versions of Windows cannot access GPT disks either. This falls in line with comments I've read about MS's biggest competitor being itself (That is, people not having any incentive to upgrade).
However, I'm inclined to believe this isn't some Evil Plot (tm) by the Evil Empire to screw us all over. The 32-bit version of Windows Whistler is essentially 'legacy' software in terms of disk support, meaning that it cannot access GPT disks either, and only the 64-bit version uses it. It also seems like a very reasonable precaution to prevent old legacy programs from accessing the new disk structure and messing things up. I'm sure many people, in their early linux-using days, can remember making mistakes with fdisk or a similar utility and wiping their hard drives in the process.
Also, according to the FAQ, GPT will deal with several issues with the current MBR system. Those being extremely large disk support, the "MICROS~1" problem with long/extended character file names, and data integrity.
Furthermore, according to the Microsoft FAQ, the complete specifications are available at http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/download.htm
"As if we didn't know" by CmdrTacho is a goatce.cx link. And it's not even well designed, the text that says "goatse.cx art gallery" or whatever loads way before the graphics.
From the article, "If that person were living in a country that was not a party to The Berne Convention or a member of the WTO/WIPO (and these countries are getting hard to find), countries subject to such treaties still have ways of putting economic pressure on non-treaty countries. Is it possible to hide absolutely? Sure, people manage to do it. But it's very, very hard."
Wait a second; are they saying that the US would put economic sanctions on a country because one citizen of that country is doing something illegal, and because corporations in the US don't like that? If so, why hasn't the US put sanctions on China for all the piracy that supposedly goes on there? Against a big country, you have the threat of retaliation, either economically or militarily, and against smaller countries you look like a bully.
Another thing that seems odd to me: "HavenCo has set up a business of running high-security servers on Sealand, and for $15,000.00 US you get a years' worth of service, attached to the rest of the world with a 256kbps (1/6 the maximum speed of a DSL line) connection." 256kbps isn't enough to run a server on a decently sized IRC network, I fail to see how this has a chance in hell of running a (the?) Napster server.
I know this is going against the popular opinion here at/., but I feel obligated to point out that this is essentially stealing.
Think about the people who have dedicated years of their life (possibly their entire post-grad life) to research into medical cures. I personally find this to be a much more worthy cause than most tech jobs, as it is trying to help others and improve the quality of life for humanity. Now don't those people deserve some kind of compensation for this?
Think about authors of books. An author could spend months or years working on a specific book. Most authors, AFAIK (anyone comment?) do not get paid by the hour for work they spend on a book. Sure, most books sell for more than they paper they are printed on. Does this then make it moral to photocopy or OCR/distribute multiple copies of a book just because the publisher is "ripping people off"? What about the author who could be trying to make a living for himself and his family, where every little bit helps?
Please don't get me wrong, I do realize if companies are selling things for "oo-gobs" of money then they are just trying to exploit the consumer. But the very nature of capitalism makes it so that it is in the best interests of any supplier to keep prices at a reasonable level, so that the consumer will want to purchase their good.
Of course, the self-regulating nature of capitalism starts falling apart when the government steps in (DMCA, UCITA, etc.)
IANAL, AFAIK, yada yada, standard disclaimers and all that stuff.
The difference is that you buy a car, and then physically own it and can do whatever you want with it (within normal laws not related to the purchase of the car). You license computer software, which means that you purchase permission to use it under circumstanced stated in your license agreement. You never actually own the DB software.
It's the basic difference why you can do so many things with tangable things that you buy, as opposed to intellectual property that you licence.
The bug (Which is unconfirmed, but 3-4 hours after GFrazier (Blizzard Staff Member) forwarded the bug to the dev team, the realms went down for maintainence, which is all the confirmation I need), operates off realm names, and has absolutely nothing to do with standard account names. So no, Starcraft, WC2BNE, and CD should be safe.
From what I've read, the bug (Creating a character with the name of the one you want to hack, and retrying till the server barfs and accepts it) existed in EverQuest as well, and caused some pretty severe problems till it was fixed. The difference is the bug in EQ was identified and closed in a matter of days (hours? I can't remember) after it began, not weeks like the D2 stuff's been going on for. You would think with all their commitment to hack-proofing the realms, as they have said, Blizard would at least of checked how other MMORPGs were exploited in the past and made sure they weren't vulnerable to similar bugs.
And HOW does this differ from R rated movies? Not allowing children under 18 to see R rated movies is actually MORE restricting, because the parent has to physically go to the movie with the minor. With video games, a parent can just buy the game and let their child play it at home. I don't see anyone going around screaming that the movie rating system is "A ban on violent movies, more or less."
This thing is about gambling. Mabye you could try reading the whole article next time before making an un-informed post in an attempt to get karma. They're shutting down arcades because gambling in them is becoming a problem, not so much the video games.
Still, you this doesn't completely make sense. Gambling establisments in the same location as video games are causing our children to steal money to gamble more. Therefore we should ban video games? Methinks not.
Somehow I doubt the government is going to start telling what you can and cannot play in your own home. One could even consider an extention of Roe vs Wade to cover this. I honestly don't think that a government saying that one has to be 18 or older to buy a game that has massive graphic violence in it is all that bad of a thing. That brings it to the point of one's parents telling you what you can and cannot play in your home, and I'm sorry, but you don't have that many rights in a matter like this. The point of that last like, imho, is that we should realize that government saying you have to be 18 or older to buy a game is a much more reasonable thing than alot of people think.
I would like to note that a few years ago, when I took a trip to the UK, I ended up going into a few arcades there, and the place was about 75% gambling, 25% video games. If you read the article, it says that the ban was mainly focused at the illegal gambling 'arcades', and happened to catch the legitimate arcades as a side effect. I don't agree with this, but I don't think it's all that bad of a thing either. Given that the US has restrictions on gambling as well, I think people should realize that diferent countries are going to deal with different things differently.
Maybe it's just be, but this seems in many ways like a complete about face for MS. In the past they have always seemed to very confident of themselves, almost to the point of unreasonable arrogance. Or at least that's how their public relations people make them look. What would they have to gain by doing this, instead of requesting a shorter appeal process so they can get their name out of the mud, so to speak?
Since from when I can first remember seeing banner adds, I can also remember seeing "please click here to support this page" right below them. People often end up clicking adds in order to 'support' a site and generate money, rather than being interested in the content of the adds. If people can exploit something for money, they will.
Secondly, banner adds are what give people incentive to cheat on search engines. If they can get more hits per month, that directly translates to more clicks (or impressions) per month, and more $$$. In today's society with the commercialization of the internet and 'dot-commies', I would bet money that the resulting information would definately be used to make somebody a quick buck.
That being said, I would wager that the final result would end up being more reliable search engines, but the potential problems may or may not be worth it.
AOL doesn't seem like the "bad guy" in this case to me. AIM allows people to send instant messages over AOL, which was previously a proprietary service provided to AOL members. It's their servers and internal software which you're relying upon for AIM to work. They can keep this supported by having their banner adds and "AOL 5.0 free!" adds (Like we don't get enough coasters and free disks with this on it already...).
I'm not trying to seem like an asshole here, but I doubt slashdot would appreciate it if someone came up with a way to mirror and allow posting of all their content without the banner adds to pay for the servers and bandwidth. (Yes, I'm aware one can simply use lynx, or turn off graphics, but the idea is still the same).
I personally love the AIM software. It allows you to communicate with AOL users cleanly and easily, and was what I needed to convince a family member to get off AOL and onto a generic local ISP.
AOL has provided this service to the public, which you would otherwise be paying $10/month for, for free. In return they request that you put up with some small banner adds. Doesn't seem like that big of a trade-off. And while I realize that the Linux version is still greatly lacking, it's understandable that they'd like to have money to support their expenses for the service that they're providing.
This kind of goes back to the discussion awhile ago on the EverQuest emulator. Verant spent the time, money, and effort, to develop their client and all the artwork, models, textures, and maps, with the intent that they would be used for their 10$/month game.
While I agree this issue is somewhat debatable, I don't think AOL deserves the bashing that it's going to recieve for this. THEY are the ones who are paying for this, not you.
What's the diffrence between that and a crowbar, or a baseball bat? Hell, we're allowed to carry arround GUNS, according to the constitution...why should a computer program which can have perfectly legitmate uses be banned like this? It just goes to show that the masses don't have anywhere near enough education about issues like these to make legislature and decisions based upon computer law.
Mabye I'm just being overly paranoid, but this really seems like something which shouldn't be messed with. I've heard people say that Cancer and AIDS/HIV are nature's way of dealing with overpopulation. To me, these things seem like highly uncontrolable viruses. With technology racing forward like it is today, I can't help but look at various science fiction stories about mankind destroying itself somehow, and wonder if that's what we're about to do. Especially with the year 2000 comming up soon, and all the various predictions that the world is going to end, and whatnot. I'm not a medical expert by far, but this still scares me.
I'm starting to wonder if those wild stories about hackers starting world wars aren't going to be all that wild soon. IMHO, there are some things which computers should NOT be relied upon for. Banks have been hacked before, and there HAS been blackmail and money transfered. I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to imagine a voting system being hacked. Can you imagine what it would be like if the government had to say two months after an election "Oops, Clinton didn't really win, a hacker stuffed the ballot"?
I would honestly be more comfortable with people being able to telephone in their votes, where a living breathing person was responsable for cataloging the votes. Yes, people are prone to mistakes, but people are alot less likely to have a security hole in them exploited (Yes, this is a debatable fact).
People were looked at the same way when they said the Earth is flat, or that the Earth is NOT the center of the Universe. Or at least that's what we're taught. It makes me wonder how much of what schools teach us is actually true, and how much "Common Sense" we should believe. After all, people used to think that heavier objects fall faster than light objects.
Slashdot Mirror
From, well, the body of the SUMMARY:
"The benchmarks are interesting, but should be taken with a grain of salt since this is a fairly early pre-release configuration."
What part of that do you not understand?
"If you lose your key to your house then you are stuck. If you lose your key (an AUTHORIZED DVD player) then you are going to have to purchase another one. There is no need for DeCSS."
What I find particularly amusing about this is that we are allowed to make copies of our keys to get into our houses, in case our originals get damaged, lost, etc. But we are not allowed to make copies of our "keys" to view DVDs? Why not? Those "keys" aren't patented or copyrighted, to my knowledge.
I find your analogy to be flawed.
...that the RIAA was only going after SERVICE providers that helped people trade mp3s. AIMster, to my knowledge, is only software that doesn't rely upon a central server (being based on gnutella and all). So how exactly are they going to get an injunction? The whole point with Napster was that Napster provided a SERVICE, NOT software, to help people trade mp3s. Therefore, it wasn't quite like suing someone for using FAT32 for piracy. I think the approprate analogy would be free disk-space type providers that used FAT32 to allow people to store and distribute mp3s =).
Microsoft is also making it so that earlier versions of Windows cannot access GPT disks either. This falls in line with comments I've read about MS's biggest competitor being itself (That is, people not having any incentive to upgrade).
d .htm
However, I'm inclined to believe this isn't some Evil Plot (tm) by the Evil Empire to screw us all over. The 32-bit version of Windows Whistler is essentially 'legacy' software in terms of disk support, meaning that it cannot access GPT disks either, and only the 64-bit version uses it. It also seems like a very reasonable precaution to prevent old legacy programs from accessing the new disk structure and messing things up. I'm sure many people, in their early linux-using days, can remember making mistakes with fdisk or a similar utility and wiping their hard drives in the process.
Also, according to the FAQ, GPT will deal with several issues with the current MBR system. Those being extremely large disk support, the "MICROS~1" problem with long/extended character file names, and data integrity.
Furthermore, according to the Microsoft FAQ, the complete specifications are available at http://developer.intel.com/technology/efi/downloa
"As if we didn't know" by CmdrTacho is a goatce.cx link. And it's not even well designed, the text that says "goatse.cx art gallery" or whatever loads way before the graphics.
getting them hit with the slashdot effect certainly seems like a good way to start getting revenge ;)
From the article, "If that person were living in a country that was not a party to The Berne Convention or a member of the WTO/WIPO (and these countries are getting hard to find), countries subject to such treaties still have ways of putting economic pressure on non-treaty countries. Is it possible to hide absolutely? Sure, people manage to do it. But it's very, very hard."
Wait a second; are they saying that the US would put economic sanctions on a country because one citizen of that country is doing something illegal, and because corporations in the US don't like that? If so, why hasn't the US put sanctions on China for all the piracy that supposedly goes on there? Against a big country, you have the threat of retaliation, either economically or militarily, and against smaller countries you look like a bully.
Another thing that seems odd to me: "HavenCo has set up a business of running high-security servers on Sealand, and for $15,000.00 US you get a years' worth of service, attached to the rest of the world with a 256kbps (1/6 the maximum speed of a DSL line) connection." 256kbps isn't enough to run a server on a decently sized IRC network, I fail to see how this has a chance in hell of running a (the?) Napster server.
I know this is going against the popular opinion here at /., but I feel obligated to point out that this is essentially stealing.
Think about the people who have dedicated years of their life (possibly their entire post-grad life) to research into medical cures. I personally find this to be a much more worthy cause than most tech jobs, as it is trying to help others and improve the quality of life for humanity. Now don't those people deserve some kind of compensation for this?
Think about authors of books. An author could spend months or years working on a specific book. Most authors, AFAIK (anyone comment?) do not get paid by the hour for work they spend on a book. Sure, most books sell for more than they paper they are printed on. Does this then make it moral to photocopy or OCR/distribute multiple copies of a book just because the publisher is "ripping people off"? What about the author who could be trying to make a living for himself and his family, where every little bit helps?
Please don't get me wrong, I do realize if companies are selling things for "oo-gobs" of money then they are just trying to exploit the consumer. But the very nature of capitalism makes it so that it is in the best interests of any supplier to keep prices at a reasonable level, so that the consumer will want to purchase their good.
Of course, the self-regulating nature of capitalism starts falling apart when the government steps in (DMCA, UCITA, etc.)
Yes, my spelling sucks. Deal.
IANAL, AFAIK, yada yada, standard disclaimers and all that stuff.
The difference is that you buy a car, and then physically own it and can do whatever you want with it (within normal laws not related to the purchase of the car). You license computer software, which means that you purchase permission to use it under circumstanced stated in your license agreement. You never actually own the DB software.
It's the basic difference why you can do so many things with tangable things that you buy, as opposed to intellectual property that you licence.
The bug (Which is unconfirmed, but 3-4 hours after GFrazier (Blizzard Staff Member) forwarded the bug to the dev team, the realms went down for maintainence, which is all the confirmation I need), operates off realm names, and has absolutely nothing to do with standard account names. So no, Starcraft, WC2BNE, and CD should be safe.
From what I've read, the bug (Creating a character with the name of the one you want to hack, and retrying till the server barfs and accepts it) existed in EverQuest as well, and caused some pretty severe problems till it was fixed. The difference is the bug in EQ was identified and closed in a matter of days (hours? I can't remember) after it began, not weeks like the D2 stuff's been going on for. You would think with all their commitment to hack-proofing the realms, as they have said, Blizard would at least of checked how other MMORPGs were exploited in the past and made sure they weren't vulnerable to similar bugs.
And HOW does this differ from R rated movies? Not allowing children under 18 to see R rated movies is actually MORE restricting, because the parent has to physically go to the movie with the minor. With video games, a parent can just buy the game and let their child play it at home. I don't see anyone going around screaming that the movie rating system is "A ban on violent movies, more or less."
This thing is about gambling. Mabye you could try reading the whole article next time before making an un-informed post in an attempt to get karma. They're shutting down arcades because gambling in them is becoming a problem, not so much the video games.
Still, you this doesn't completely make sense. Gambling establisments in the same location as video games are causing our children to steal money to gamble more. Therefore we should ban video games? Methinks not.
Somehow I doubt the government is going to start telling what you can and cannot play in your own home. One could even consider an extention of Roe vs Wade to cover this. I honestly don't think that a government saying that one has to be 18 or older to buy a game that has massive graphic violence in it is all that bad of a thing. That brings it to the point of one's parents telling you what you can and cannot play in your home, and I'm sorry, but you don't have that many rights in a matter like this. The point of that last like, imho, is that we should realize that government saying you have to be 18 or older to buy a game is a much more reasonable thing than alot of people think.
I would like to note that a few years ago, when I took a trip to the UK, I ended up going into a few arcades there, and the place was about 75% gambling, 25% video games. If you read the article, it says that the ban was mainly focused at the illegal gambling 'arcades', and happened to catch the legitimate arcades as a side effect. I don't agree with this, but I don't think it's all that bad of a thing either. Given that the US has restrictions on gambling as well, I think people should realize that diferent countries are going to deal with different things differently.
could you explain this to me? I wasn't aware that I was using other than normal text.
Maybe it's just be, but this seems in many ways like a complete about face for MS. In the past they have always seemed to very confident of themselves, almost to the point of unreasonable arrogance. Or at least that's how their public relations people make them look. What would they have to gain by doing this, instead of requesting a shorter appeal process so they can get their name out of the mud, so to speak?
Is for someone to encode DeCSS in an electron :)
Two points:
Since from when I can first remember seeing banner adds, I can also remember seeing "please click here to support this page" right below them. People often end up clicking adds in order to 'support' a site and generate money, rather than being interested in the content of the adds. If people can exploit something for money, they will.
Secondly, banner adds are what give people incentive to cheat on search engines. If they can get more hits per month, that directly translates to more clicks (or impressions) per month, and more $$$. In today's society with the commercialization of the internet and 'dot-commies', I would bet money that the resulting information would definately be used to make somebody a quick buck.
That being said, I would wager that the final result would end up being more reliable search engines, but the potential problems may or may not be worth it.
AOL doesn't seem like the "bad guy" in this case to me. AIM allows people to send instant messages over AOL, which was previously a proprietary service provided to AOL members. It's their servers and internal software which you're relying upon for AIM to work. They can keep this supported by having their banner adds and "AOL 5.0 free!" adds (Like we don't get enough coasters and free disks with this on it already...).
I'm not trying to seem like an asshole here, but I doubt slashdot would appreciate it if someone came up with a way to mirror and allow posting of all their content without the banner adds to pay for the servers and bandwidth. (Yes, I'm aware one can simply use lynx, or turn off graphics, but the idea is still the same).
I personally love the AIM software. It allows you to communicate with AOL users cleanly and easily, and was what I needed to convince a family member to get off AOL and onto a generic local ISP.
AOL has provided this service to the public, which you would otherwise be paying $10/month for, for free. In return they request that you put up with some small banner adds. Doesn't seem like that big of a trade-off. And while I realize that the Linux version is still greatly lacking, it's understandable that they'd like to have money to support their expenses for the service that they're providing.
This kind of goes back to the discussion awhile ago on the EverQuest emulator. Verant spent the time, money, and effort, to develop their client and all the artwork, models, textures, and maps, with the intent that they would be used for their 10$/month game.
While I agree this issue is somewhat debatable, I don't think AOL deserves the bashing that it's going to recieve for this. THEY are the ones who are paying for this, not you.
What's the diffrence between that and a crowbar, or a baseball bat? Hell, we're allowed to carry arround GUNS, according to the constitution...why should a computer program which can have perfectly legitmate uses be banned like this? It just goes to show that the masses don't have anywhere near enough education about issues like these to make legislature and decisions based upon computer law.
Mabye I'm just being overly paranoid, but this really seems like something which shouldn't be messed with. I've heard people say that Cancer and AIDS/HIV are nature's way of dealing with overpopulation. To me, these things seem like highly uncontrolable viruses. With technology racing forward like it is today, I can't help but look at various science fiction stories about mankind destroying itself somehow, and wonder if that's what we're about to do. Especially with the year 2000 comming up soon, and all the various predictions that the world is going to end, and whatnot. I'm not a medical expert by far, but this still scares me.
Anyone care to ease my fears?
I'm starting to wonder if those wild stories about hackers starting world wars aren't going to be all that wild soon. IMHO, there are some things which computers should NOT be relied upon for. Banks have been hacked before, and there HAS been blackmail and money transfered. I don't think it's all that much of a stretch to imagine a voting system being hacked. Can you imagine what it would be like if the government had to say two months after an election "Oops, Clinton didn't really win, a hacker stuffed the ballot"?
I would honestly be more comfortable with people being able to telephone in their votes, where a living breathing person was responsable for cataloging the votes. Yes, people are prone to mistakes, but people are alot less likely to have a security hole in them exploited (Yes, this is a debatable fact).
People were looked at the same way when they said the Earth is flat, or that the Earth is NOT the center of the Universe. Or at least that's what we're taught. It makes me wonder how much of what schools teach us is actually true, and how much "Common Sense" we should believe. After all, people used to think that heavier objects fall faster than light objects.